The contribution of regions to EU democracy

In “the new circumstances of political organization” – that is, in the highly interconnected context of the European Union – sovereignty must be exercised in a responsible manner. The very understanding of democracy must go beyond the eighteenth-century notion of the self-legislating demos, at once the author and the subject of its laws, and rather conform to a transnational, multilateral and multilevel notion of democracy. All of these notions depart from the conventional understanding of democracy because, in the words of James Bohman (2007: 21), “The monism of a self-legislating people cannot provide a theory of democracy consistent with the pluralization of authority and the disaggregation of sovereignty that we are witnessing”. What is the specific contribution that the regions can make to this notion of democracy? This chapter aims to provide answers to these questions by focusing on the European Committee of the Regions (CoR), a consultative body of the European Union (EU). If good democratic governance “needs both bigger and smaller units” (Bohman 2007: 7), then in the EU context it needs not only democratic institutions and procedures at supranational and national level, but also at subnational level.